Journey of the PoeT

21,111 notes

archiemcphee:

These awesome photos, in which rolling waves appear to be both perfectly frozen in time and miraculously made solid, are the work of French photographer Pierre Carreau.

Carreau “shoots waves with a variety of high speed cameras using various macro and wide angle lenses, capturing water shapes that appear more sculptural than liquid.”

Visit his Pierre Carreau’s website to view many more examples of his amazing work. He also offers prints of some of his images via Clic Gallery.

[via Colossal]

(via redmagus77)

2 notes

ununnilium asked: That's true! You must have more than one understanding; you must reach for all the understandings.

This is very true.

Understanding perspectives outside one’s own is perhaps the most important skill an individual can hone.  It broadens the mind, lays the brickwork for empathy and compassion, and gives one a greater flexibility of thought.

It’s also important to know that understanding another’s perspective is not the same thing as agreeing with it.

35,244 notes

ecmajor:

wnycradiolab:

atlasobscura:

odditiesoflife:

The Amazing Underwater Forest of Lake Kaindy

What makes Lake Kaindy truly remarkable is that it contains an underwater forest. Visible on the lakes surface are the tall, dried-out tops of submerged Spruce trees that rise above the water’s surface like the masts of sunken ships. They are the only sign of the amazing frozen forest below the water’s surface.

The water is so cold (even in summer the temperature does not exceed 6 degrees) that the pine needles remain on the trees, even after a hundred years of being submerged. During the winter, the lake freezes and becomes a popular spot for ice diving.

The lake is 400 meters long and is located in Kazakhstan’s portion of the Tian Shan Mountains, about 129 km from the city of Almaty. The lake was created after an earthquake in 1911 triggered a large landslide blocking the gorge and forming a natural dam.

Even more on Kaindy Lake… 

Holy crap.

wow

4 notes

ununnilium asked: See, I like myself super a lot and am always trying to improve and do better and level up.

Don’t misunderstand me.  I am not saying that everyone who seeks to better themselves must necessarily hate themselves or that the only drive to improve is self loathing.

What I was trying to communicate is that a person’s mental state can be more complicated than the single apparent issue.  That sometimes the bad things can have more effects than just the most evident one.

There is an impulse to simplify our problems, to seek The One Issue that explains all our difficulties and if we just fix The One Issue that everything would be better.  But in the course of my life, I have found that the truth is more often that our problems aren’t really so concise.  More often our One Problem is really a much more complex and involved set of issues, sometimes overlapping and interacting with each other.  Such that our One Problem is itself an effect of a much greater network of issues.  Or even things that aren’t really issues.

And from this I have realized that a lot of those “negative” traits really aren’t so negative, but are merely the flip-side to things that other people would call positive.  And when people say “You just have to be more self-confident” they don’t realize that, for me and some others, that is actually a far more complicated issue than they imagine.

My lack of confidence and general sense of self-loathing has driven me to try harder and seek more sure paths to understanding, through reason and logic.  By no means is this the only way to find yourself at that point.  One of the greatest aspects of life is that there are many ways to achieve the same result.  I found myself here because of self-doubt, whereas another person might have found themselves here for exactly the opposite reason.

In the end, it is more about how you react to your situation than the situation itself.

64,164 notes

elasticitymudflap: ericaisawesome56: farfromgotham: Fun fact time: many of my old acquaintances still make joking comments whenever they see me wearing pink, because as a child (and honestly pretty much right up to high school) I would refuse to associate with any pink objects.  It wasn’t because I didn’t like pink, it was because since I appeared female I was supposed to/ it was immediately assumed that I did and therefore it pissed me the ever-loving fuck off. I was ashamed to like it, which is terrible because pink is an awesome color. But when you shove it down young girls throats it gets really old, really fast.  Give the child the fucking rainbow, and if they pick pink, it’s not because they are female and/or effeminate, it’s because they like the color pink.  THIS. Gosh this

elasticitymudflap:

ericaisawesome56:

farfromgotham:

Fun fact time: many of my old acquaintances still make joking comments whenever they see me wearing pink, because as a child (and honestly pretty much right up to high school) I would refuse to associate with any pink objects. 

It wasn’t because I didn’t like pink, it was because since I appeared female I was supposed to/ it was immediately assumed that I did and therefore it pissed me the ever-loving fuck off. I was ashamed to like it, which is terrible because pink is an awesome color. But when you shove it down young girls throats it gets really old, really fast. 

Give the child the fucking rainbow, and if they pick pink, it’s not because they are female and/or effeminate, it’s because they like the color pink. 

THIS.

Gosh this

(Source: feminishblog, via redmagus77)

6 notes

The Confidence Conundrum

That frustrating feeling you get when people tell you “You need to be more self-confident.” and you just want to grab them and shake them and yell “But my self-loathing is what keeps me wanting to do better!”.

Because, if I liked myself, I would never try to improve who I am and that would lead to stagnation.  And in the supreme irony, it is always the drive to do better that I am complimented on.  As if, somehow, the self-loathing and the determination to do better are not linked.

It is a staggering misunderstanding in how we comprehend personalities that we want to separate the “good” aspects of someone from the “bad” aspects.  As if these traits are somehow independent.  The truth, as I see it, is that the things that make us driven, that compel us to do better are often the same things that make us look in the mirror and think “You worthless git.”.

A person’s mind is a closely woven mesh of threads and a single strand may wind it’s way around many points, such that a tug at this end may find itself pulling on something completely unexpected.  We must remember this when seeking to give others advice:  We are the sum of all aspects of our minds, good and bad and neither extreme is the real us but a combination, as inseparable as light and shadow.  Both are requisite for the whole to exist. 

Filed under thought insight the mind confidence self-confidence

32,460 notes

221badwolfstreet:

aswimmersparadise:

Let me tell you something about today. Today was the hottest day of the year in New Jersey, I woke up sweating despite air conditioning because it was 95 degrees. Now, i did what any logical person would do and I put on my favorite pair of shorts so i wouldn’t be sweating throughout the day.

        Even in my shorts i was sweating my balls off but I went through half of my day as normal, no boys stared at my ass or tried to grope me in public yet when i went to the the cafeteria a teacher told me to go to the office because he finds my shorts inappropriate. I head down to the office to find a group of girls wearing shorts and skirts sitting in a small room in the office, we where all ordered to call our parents or to change into the clothes they had offered us from the school store. These items of clothing included sweatpants and a large heavy sweatshirt. I obviously refused to wear those because it was 95 degrees and when you are sweating the key to cool down is NOT to put on more clothes. They told me I would have to stay in that room the whole day if it came down to it.

      I was able to leave the office when my friend gave me a pair of yoga pants. The man who made me go down to the office brought down several other girls as I was leaving, at this point they didn’t care how long the shorts where they just sent everyone who was wearing a pair down. They warned me that if I put my shorts back on they would wright me up. 

     I put them back on anyway because just walking down the hallway in those yoga pants made me faint, dizzy,and extremely hot. Thats the main issue, it is hot enough for people to pass out in school but to the school system they would rather a girl suffer from a heat stroke then to have a boy become  turned on. My shorts don’t say “COme fuck me in the middle of class” they say,”Its warm out”

The sexualizing of innocent students is not okay

Risking students health is not okay

and tHE LACK OF FEMINISM IN THE SCHOOL SYSTEM WILL NEVER BE OKAY

Today was literally horrible

I hate our school so much

(via mineyourmoria)